


With All These Leaves

by FyrMaiden



Category: Glee
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Blood, Child Carer, Gen, Homophobic Violence (past; not graphic), Hospital Stay (past; not graphic), Infidelity, Minor character death (OC), Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-13
Updated: 2016-02-13
Packaged: 2018-05-20 05:46:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 18,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5993724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FyrMaiden/pseuds/FyrMaiden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s the scars that are left when the bruises heal that are the hardest to live with. Two years after he was assaulted and left broken and bloody outside of the gym at his school, Blaine is safe, whole, alive if nothing else. He knows he should be happy, but everything around him is falling apart. His mom drinks a little too much, and his dad is absent more than he used to be, and Blaine is just trying to make it to his graduation, to get out of Ohio, when Santana Lopez marches into his life, reminding him that he’s worth more than just surviving.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. her heaven is never enough

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2015 Blaine Anderson Big Bang, this one wouldn't have got this place without the help of misqueue. I also need to thank gleekmom for the art, which I will link once I work that out.
> 
> I probably should also thank the myriad tumblr conversations I see that wanted to see more of Blaine's dad, and how that relationship works in real time. This... probably isn't that story, but it's the roots of it.

i. _‘her heaven is never enough’_

Blaine closes the door to his dorm room behind him and checks the lock twice, just to be sure. His roommate has already left, offering Blaine a faint and vapid ‘Have a good Christmas, Blaine’ before disappearing with his books and without a backward glance. Blaine is a little later than he would usually be on a Friday, especially a Friday right before the winter break, but he’s had to wait for one of the few boys at Dalton who has to head toward Lima to be be done with his club before he can leave. In the absence of anything else to do, he’d taken the time to sit in his room and get a head start on his reading and now, as the time on his phone’s display creeps closer to 5pm, he’s ready to leave. He’s checked his reflection, made sure his hair is perfect, and pulled his leather jacket on over the unadorned black of his hoodie. He zips both to his throat, the wool lining of his jacket tickling his chin. Once the door is locked, he stamps his feet more comfortably into his boots, grabs his case and his bag, and heads down toward the senior commons.

It’s not unusual for Blaine to find himself stuck at school on a Friday afternoon. His dad’s hours are long and unpredictable, and a text at some point in the afternoon is common. Today’s had been brief - ‘Meeting is running long. Won’t be free until much later. Can you get home by yourself?’ - but had at least come through before his classmates started packing for the holiday. If he couldn’t get a ride, he knows his dad would arrange transport for him. It’s just - Lima is out of the way for most of the boys he knows, and he feels guilty asking for the favour. 

Wes will always do it, for the gas money and Blaine’s promise to try out for the Warblers some time. This Friday is no exception. He smiles as he sees Blaine approach, and Blaine smiles back automatically.

“Have you found the right song yet?” he asks, once Blaine is within earshot, and Blaine laughs and shakes his head.

“Still looking,” he replies. “It’s between Katy Perry and Pink.” The same as always.

Wes appraises him steadily, and then says, “I know it’s scary to be a part of something, Blaine. But I think it’d be good for you.”

Blaine’s mouth presses into a line and he stares at his shoes for a moment before Wes claps his shoulder and it’s over for at least one more week. They climb into his car, Blaine’s bags crowding the passenger footwell, and head for home.

The drive gives Blaine time to reflect, and he thinks that it’s not the singing that scares him. That part he can cope with. It’s more the fact that, for all of Dalton Academy’s progressive ideals, Blaine has his suspicions that there may be a line of tolerance for boys like him. Show choir is probably where it lies, and he’s not ready to test his theory. He knows what happens when he does, so he swims and he boxes and he’s learned lacrosse. He learns to assimilate. It’s safer that way.

They’re within Lima’s town limits, Blaine fiddling with the volume on the radio, when Wes says, “No one at Dalton cares, you know that, right?” Blaine stops, withdraws his hand slowly.

“About?”

“That you’re gay,” Wes says. Blaine folds his hands into his lap and forces a polite smile. He’s not sure that ‘not caring’ is what he’s looking for either, not when it informs so much of who he is. He’s not like them. Not really. Wes must be able to feel the tension, though, because he says, “We’d like you to at least try out.”

Blaine is silent until they pull into his street, and Wes is serious when he stops outside of Blaine’s house, the trees dappling the orange of the streetlights across the windshield, casting both of them in eerie shadow. 

“You’re good, Blaine,” he says, “And I think you’d enjoy it. That’s all I’m saying.” Blaine hitches his bag onto his shoulder, grins a little lopsided. Despite the layers beneath it, his flying jacket is still a little light for the cold of the evening when he pushes the passenger door open. He glances up toward his house and then back at Wes.

“I’ll think about it,” he says, and means it as it comes out of his mouth, and then, “Thank you.” 

Wes nods as Blaine closes the door behind him, and Blaine knows he isn’t really fooling him. He still stands at the end of his path, though, shivering as the warmth of the car evaporates with his breath, watching as Wes pulls away before turning and heading slowly for his front door.

Once the door has closed behind him, Blaine allows himself to shed the façade of danger, of untouchable barely suppressed anger, that he wears outside. He leans back against it and feels the tension he wears like armour to slip from him along with the jacket. He kicks his boots off, drops his bag and calls out for his mom. Here, in private, Blaine gives himself permission to be 17 years old, damaged and scared and still alive regardless. The world has tried to beat him down, and he's still here. 

His mom doesn’t respond to his shout, which doesn’t surprise him. She’s asleep more often than she’s not on Friday afternoons, and Blaine is used to coming home to the dark and the quiet. As he trails from room to room, Blaine turns on the lights, chasing the lingering shadows from the corners. In the living room, he kneels to ferret under the tree for the switch to bring its twinkling fairy lights to life. Despite his mom’s objections, the Christmas tree is a tradition his dad insists on maintaining. After that, he turns on the TV for company and noise, and to banish the deathly hush that creeps along behind him toward the kitchen.

Blaine knows it’s been difficult for his mother, since the trouble at his old school and since he transferred to Dalton the previous year. She doesn’t like not being able to see him four nights out of seven, doesn’t like not being able to check he’s physically fine. He gets it. He thinks he understands.

The thing is, Dalton is good. It’s safe. He’s safe. Even if he’s not happy some days, he’s protected by school policy and tradition in ways he wasn’t in public school, and that knowledge eases a little of the burden for them both. On socked feet he pads silently across the kitchen floor and pulls open the refrigerator door. His mom still drinks a little too much to mask her worry, and to dull her own fear. After all, not two years before, she’d nearly lost him for good.

As he expects, the bottle of wine in the door is a new bottle, different from the one he made the discreet black line on the Sunday before, and it’s half empty already. He pulls a pen from his back pocket and makes a tiny dot on the label, and then returns the bottle to the door. He knows it’s a problem, that his mom needs someone to intervene, but he doesn’t know who, doesn’t know how to help her himself, and so he closes the door again and leans his forehead against the cool aluminium. He distracts himself by trying to think about what they have that he can make for dinner, instead. His mom won’t be up for cooking, and they have to eat something. He considers calling his dad, asking him when he’ll be home and if he can bring pizza or Chinese food with him, and then thinks better of it again and calls his grandmother instead, asks her to talk him through _adobo_ , the only thing he thinks maybe they have the ingredients to make.

“Where’s your mom, honey?” she asks when he says goodbye, and Blaine frowns at the pan simmering on the stove in front of him, stirs it a little too aggressively so the sauce splashes him and the oven and the floor. 

“Ill,” he says. “She went to bed early.” 

“And your dad?” 

Blaine sighs. “He’s working late,” he responds, and then, lamely, “Lola, I’ve got school work I’ve got to do. I’ll call you over the holiday.” 

He listens to her for a few more minutes, and then hangs up with a firm goodbye. He sets the timer on the oven, and heads back into the hall to pick up his bag. He spoons himself a bowl of food and sets his books out on the table, resolute in the knowledge that he has to get the hell out of Ohio some day.

-

Blaine is curled up on the couch with the TV remote when his dad comes home. It’s late, and he knows he should be long in bed himself, but he’s beyond tired and he has such limited time at home, surrounded by things which are familiar and comforting. The tree lights reflect with false joviality in the mirror above the hearth, and in the glass of the table top, and off of the lenses of his own glasses. He can’t bring himself to turn the twinkling white lights off, though. They remind him that it’s Christmas - his dad insists on keeping Christmas, although Blaine doesn’t recall the last time his lapsed Catholic father set foot in a church - and he’s made it through another year. He looks up as he shuts the TV off, and his dad pauses in the doorway for a second too long. There’s a glimmer of something that looks like guilt on his face, and then he’s moving again. Blaine notes how his hair is still damp, curling at the temples in the same way his own hair does after gym, before he can tame it again. 

“Mom’s not up,” he calls, and hears a muffled responses from the kitchen. His dad reappears in the doorway. “I checked on her earlier. I guess she’s sleeping it off.” 

His dad nods, his mouth a grim line. His eyes are resigned, the lines of his face sad in the low light of the lamps Blaine has turned on. Blaine can feel the tension from where he’s sitting, electric and uncomfortable. It’s a familiar scene, and he knows that neither he nor his dad are happy with how things are, with how they’ve become. 

“Who cooked?” he asks. Blaine raises his hand and waves it. “It’s good,” his dad says, a little stilted and uncomfortable. Blaine flicks on his brightest smile, but he can feel the tension at the edges and knows it won’t stay.

“Thanks,” he says, and then, “Lola helped. Via phone at least. I figured - it’s always pizza. I told her mom wasn’t well and had gone to bed when she asked. If she checks, I don’t -”

“You did good, Blaine,” his dad says, and Blaine feels himself sag a little into the cushions. Blaine doesn’t mention his mom again. He knows his dad will check on her before he eats, and he knows that the ping of the timer as his dad’s dinner reheats will be his cue to head up the stairs to his bedroom, turn his iPod on quietly and fall asleep as best he can to the white noise of the radio.

His dad comes to sit beside him on the couch, pulls him into a sideways hug. Blaine, at 17, is far too old for such things, and too much has passed between them for it to be as easy as it once was. He lets himself be held, but he knows his dad can feel it too. His dad’s arm leaves his shoulders and, as the cold slips between them, Blaine wonders if regret is genetic. His dad smiles at him, grips his shoulder as he stands, and Blaine offers an empty smile. 

“Get some sleep, squirt,” his dad says softly, and kisses his hair. “Your mom wants you to go to Temple whilst you’re home.”

Blaine doesn’t speak as he pulls away, doesn’t really think he can. Emotion and exhaustion well up inside of him, closing his throat and fogging his brain. “Love you,” he says eventually, pushing himself upright. 

“Love you, too,” his dad says, and moves to put food in the microwave. He pauses in the doorway and says, “Blaine - just remember -” And then, “Nevermind. Get some sleep.”

Blaine tries not to think about the things his dad doesn’t say, and pushes his uneasiness away altogether when, the following morning, his mom greets him in the kitchen with a smile and a hug. Her hands are warm from the coffee mug sitting on the breakfast counter, and she pulls him against her. Exactly as he has since he was barely toddling, he tucks his face into her neck and wraps his arms around her tightly. For a fleeting moment, he wonders what it would be to be held like this against a boy who loves him unconditionally, but the thought passes, as it always does. Progressive school or not, this is still Ohio, and he has the fading aches and the repeated year to remind him that Ohio doesn’t like boys like him. 

His mom pats his sleep dishevelled hair, the tiny baby curls that break free around his neck and his ears as he tosses in the night. “Sorry about yesterday,” she says softly, and Blaine shakes his head, dissembles, and regrets it when her mouth turns down slightly. He never wants to be the reason she looks so sad. “How about you wash up and dress, and I’ll make breakfast?”

“Dad?” he says, and she doesn’t meet his eyes, only picks up her coffee and tells him again to shower and get dressed. He ducks around her instead, pours himself a glass of apple juice and checks the level on the wine. It’s the same, and he lets himself smile as he puts the juice back and closes the door. 

“Your dad’s at work,” she says, holds her mug with both hands. Blaine downs his juice and rinses the glass in the sink, and then offers her another hug, awkward around her coffee. 

It might be late December outside of their front door, but behind it, Blaine can feel his family starting to fall apart.


	2. heart strings resuscitate

ii. _‘heart strings resuscitate’_

Christmas passes, though, as it inevitably does. Blaine stays up to watch the ball drop in Times Square on the TV, and then yawns and stretches so long that his spine cracks. “I’ll see you later,” he tells his dad, and his dad nods and says he won’t be long either. Blaine hears him on the phone in the hallway as he pads between the bathroom and his bedroom, and what he hears - _‘It’s difficult to get away right now’_ , and, _‘I’ll be back in on Tuesday’_ , and, _‘We’ll talk about this later’,_ and, _‘I can’t say it back, you know that, not now’ -_ doesn’t confirm his suspicions, but does little to alleviate them either. They take the tree down and carefully box the lights and ornaments, Blaine wrapping them in tissue and storing them carefully in their cases before they manhandle them into the attic for another year. He helps his dad to get the tree into his station wagon, and they drive it across town to be turned into wood chips. Blaine’s cheeks sting and the cold makes his eyes water as he watches the chipper spray their tree across the ground, and then they’re back in the car and heading home, stopping only at The Lima Bean for coffee and biscotti and a muffin for his mom. As he often does, Blaine has a flash of wondering what it would be to split a Christmas cookie with someone special at one of the small tables at the other end of the counter, and he loses himself for a moment in his imagination. His dad nudges him forward, though, and the spell breaks. 

Too quickly, winter break ends and the hours until he has to be ready for school begin again to dwindle into single figures. His dad goes back to working late, and Blaine’s suspicions well up again. His mom puts two bottles of wine into the refrigerator, but she also sits with him and talks with him as he finishes up his homework. She’s bright and funny, and she touches him a little too often, as if she’s making sure he’s definitely still real and well, and he lets her without comment or argument. He remembers the way her hands felt in his hair, keeping it gelled and flat for him whilst he was - when he couldn’t do it for himself. The morning his dad puts his bag in the car for him and tries to hustle him out of the front door, his mom doesn’t come downstairs to see him off. Blaine jogs upstairs to see her instead. She strokes his hair and his face and hugs him too close and too tight. 

“Stay safe, Blainey,” she says, and he flicks his mouth into an approximation of a smile that he can feel misses his eyes.

“You too, Mom,” he says, and his dad calls from downstairs. “I’ll be home Friday, okay?” 

She nods and lets him go, and he closes the door quietly behind him.

The thing with January is - and Blaine had managed, his first year at Dalton, to not have to attend any of them; too close and too soon to his own disastrous dance - that it brings with it the first of the year’s organised mixers with the girls from Crawford County Day. He wants to beg off of it, wants to run and hide and pull his covers over his prostrate body until it’s over for another year. It’s not the thought of the dance itself that makes his heart race, so much as his concern over how very much he doesn’t know the correct etiquette when ten girls in bobby socks and short skirts corner him with bright smiles and wide eyes. All he can do is smile politely and decline the invitation to dance, just in case dancing is a euphemism for more. When the posters go up in the common room, the date set for the second Friday of the month, Blaine feels his heart sink. He won’t have any option but to put on his best smile and hope against hope that his dad will be able to collect him before it begins. Just this once, maybe his dad will leave early on a Friday... 

He tells his mom the Sunday before, watches the colour leach from her face and her fingers curl in the soft fabric of her dress. He catches her hands in his own before it has a chance to rend, holds them tight. “Mom, don’t,” he says, quickly, quietly, desperately. “It’ll be fine. It’s - it’s not like last time. I promise.” He can’t tell if she hears him or not, her stare a thousand miles past his shoulder, and her hands gripping so tight to his that his bones grate painfully together. “I won’t go anywhere alone,” he whispers, and her gaze shifts slightly. “I’ll stay where they can see me until Dad comes this time.” 

“Not like last time,” his mom manages eventually, her gaze shifting to meet his, the tea brown of her eyes stained dark with worry and regret. Her hands release their grip, but he doesn’t let her go.

“Not like last time,” he reassures her. “I’m going - I won’t be taking anyone to this one anyway. There’s nothing to worry about.” 

Despite his reassurances, though, it’s barely 9pm when his phone buzzes in his pocket. The screen says it’s his dad calling, and it’s gone to voicemail before he can get somewhere quiet to answer. He knows, in his head, what this will be. Another of his dad’s messages asking if he can get a ride, that he’ll be later than he thought. It’s almost expected now. He puts his phone to his ear to listen, and feels his heart plummet to his feet as his dad explains that yes, he’ll have to make his own way home, or to Lima Memorial, but not for the usual reasons. It’s his mom - 

_‘Hey, Blaine. Can you get a lift home with one of your friends tonight? Your mom has had an accident and I’m going to have to take her to the ER. You don’t need to worry, but I won’t be able to pick you up. Sorry, bud.’_

‘Sorry, bud.’ Blaine feels sick in the pit of his stomach, and he stares uselessly at the phone in his hands. ‘Sorry, bud.’ He knows that’s not the way the message his parents got about him ended, when he was lying broken and deathly pale in a hospital bed, his shirt splattered with his own blood bundled in a bag for disposal. Uselessness simmers into anger that his attack is still impacting his parents like this, that there’s no switch he can flick for his mom to not worry about him the way she does. He glares at his phone. He may not need to worry, but he does anyway, and tries frantically to think who he can ask to leave with him now without having to explain why he has to go. He calls his dad back, the conversation clipped and aborted by his mom’s name being called and his dad’s rushed apology and rapid disconnection.

He jumps when a voice, smoky and sultry and ultimately unfamiliar, says behind him, “Your face will set like that, Wicket.” He spins to face it and finds himself face to face with a girl in a short (short) dress. A dress so short that all he can see is thighs and boobs and he doesn’t know what to do with his eyes, so he settles on a spot just past her shoulder, and thinks she can’t be one of the Crawford girls. Even when they roll their skirts up and their socks down, they don’t look like this girl does.

“What?” he says, and she smiles. She’s a panther there in the dark and the shadows, and Blaine takes an involuntary step back. Her teeth flash white in the gloom, and she tugs the short electric blue jacket she has over her arm on as she steps out of the shadows towards him. “Look,” he says, and gestures toward the hall and the music. “I don’t know what you want, but I’m not on your team so-” 

She laughs, actually laughs and presses her palm against her stomach as she folds herself in two. Her eyes disappear into her smile, and Blaine feels apprehension curling up his spine, the cold shivering deeper into his bones. He doesn’t have a good track record with telling people he’s gay, and he’s waiting for the backlash. He’s always waiting for the backlash. “Well,” she says, wiping at her eyes with her long fingers, blinking as she catches dislodged kohl with the pads of her ring finger. “I guess there’s something to be said for a direct approach. But we’re good, short dark and scowly. You touch my boobs and I’ll cut off your hands.” Blaine’s eyes go saucer wide and she rolls hers. “I’m trying to avoid boys who haven’t seen boobs in a year,” she says.

“More like 16,” Blaine replies, and risks a smile of his own as he finally meet her eyes with his own. “If you don’t count porn.”

“I wouldn’t,” she says, conspiratorially quiet. She moves toward him, and he finds himself leaning into her to hear. “None of those boobs are real.” 

And this time, it’s Blaine who finds himself snorting a laugh that’s both undignified and honest. “I’m Blaine,” he says, and she cants her head and narrows her eyes, stares at him down the length of her nose for a second that seems to him to drag infinite between them.

“Santana,” she says eventually, and then, “I couldn’t help overhearing you calling your - I’m guessing your dad?”

Blaine raises his chin and narrows his own eyes, defensive before she begins. “Yeah?” he hedges, ready to bolt or to fight if he has to. He’s always prepared to fight if he has to now.

“Yeah - look, I don’t need to know the details, but my girlfriend is picking me up in fifteen and we’re heading in the direction of Lima so-”

“You don’t know me.” He crosses his arms, standoffish and surly, and Santana shrugs a shoulder at him. 

“No. But you go to Dalton and I’ve yet to find a Dalton boy who’s not big on this whole honour code thing you all have going on. And I don’t see anyone else offering to drive you an hour and some to Lima right now.”

“Wes-” he starts, and then thinks, Wes probably has a date with his girlfriend on a Friday night, and Lima is a long way out of the way. “Someone,” he says instead. “Or a cab.” He stares at her, straight into her eyes, and she stares back. She seems impossibly tall when it’s just the two of them, but he’s not scared of her. Not in the way he’s scared of groups of straight boys. Not in the way he’s scared of empty parking lots. Not in the way he’s scared of being alone without his phone or where people can’t see him. Santana is scary, but he’s not scared. And he’ll have to wait here as the mixer winds down, holding up his friends possibly, or letting them leave as he assures them he’ll be fine waiting for the cab that will take him back to Lima. Alone, with a stranger… 

Blaine heaves a sigh and lifts his chin, straightens his spine. “I don’t need a ride all the way,” he says. Santana smiles and nods her head, and Blaine nods back. “Thank you,” he says, quietly, softly, because his parents didn’t raise him to be impolite. 

“It’s no big,” she says, and Blaine huffs a breath that mists in the cold, despite the warmth he feels between them. 

-

Santana’s girlfriend - Brittany, Santana says her name is, her face softer as the name passes her lips - pulls into the lot a little earlier than expected, her radio blasting Ke$ha into the stillness. She throws open the door and steps onto the gravel, her feet crunching the stones as she turns to find Santana. Blaine only sees the blonde of her hair swirl around her face, and then Santana is moving toward her, enveloping her in a hug so tight it’s as if they haven’t seen each other in months. Blaine hangs back a little, out of earshot, and feels himself blush when Santana’s girlfriend catches Santana’s face in her hands and kisses her softly. He wonders, idly, what that’s like, what it’s like to be unafraid, and then thinks better of himself. For all he knows, they’re as terrified as he is. He knows - his ribs know, and his nose knows, and the distant memory of pain reminds him, sinking low into his bones - that there’s a difference between being out and Being Out. Here, in an almost empty make-shift parking lot, where it’s dark and quiet and there are no prying eyes or threats, it’s easier to be 17 and in love with your best friend.

Probably.

He jolts back into his own body at the sound of his name, and looks up sharply. Santana holds a car door open for him, and he scrambles to pull himself together enough to accept the offer. “You can drop me wherever,” he says as he gets in. “I can walk to the - I can walk.” The girlfriend looks over her shoulder at him, tilts her head, birdlike and curious.

“It’s late,” she says, and then looks at Santana. Santana turns her head to him.

“Hospital or home,” she says. “Those are your options.” 

Blaine moves to open the car door, resentment pooling hot inside of him. It’s not just them. He knows that it’s not just them that’s eliciting the tailspin of emotion. He’s scared, for himself and for his mom, and he’s tired of fighting the worry alone, and neither of the two girls in the front of the car know him. He knows that they’re not trying to corral him into a decision, that the offer to take him to the hospital isn’t a threat, but still. He doesn’t want to be delivered to the hospital by strangers with good intentions, not again - 

His blood rushes in his ears, and he can feel his head start to spin. He’s got his hand on the door release when Santana’s fingers close around his wrist. Her grip is deceptively strong despite the fact he can see every bone beneath her paper thin skin, and it anchors him where he sits. He panics against the restraint, his body remembering the last time someone he didn’t know held him in place with a grip he couldn’t get out of, and tugs his hand away with a ferocity he doesn’t mean. She pulls her hand back quickly, holds up her palms.

“Whoa,” she says, her eyebrows arching, climbing up her forehead in surprise. Blaine’s breath is loud in his own ears, a laboured huff through the band around his chest. “Okay. Wow. Do you also bite?” He shakes his head, but knows she’s trying to break the tension that’s holding him in place. “Look, I know you have no reason to trust me, but I really don’t want to just abandon your baby ass on a roadside someplace. So let us get you somewhere safe.”

Blaine can barely get the words out, his throat closing on him. He can hear the beep of monitors, can feel the disorientation of painkillers and the grip of his mom’s hand on his own, the quiet pleading in her voice as she talked to him whilst he slept. “Hospital,” he manages eventually, slowly, muffled by his heart clogging his mouth. Santana nods and turns to her girlfriend, and Blaine finds his phone in his pocket and pushes his earbuds into his ears to drown them out, and tries not to think about the fact his mom is there at all.

The time passes slowly inside of Blaine’s head, his mind taking every second and stretching it thin, picturing all the many reasons his mom may be at the hospital tonight. The minutes on his phone have counted only a little over an hour, though, as Brittany speeds in the dark and the quiet. The shadowy silhouettes of signs blur in the dark, and illuminated billboards provide bright interludes in the expanse rushing before them. His dad calls him again when they’re only a little over a quarter of an hour from the hospital. Blaine fumbles his phone in his haste, and swears quietly. Santana’s hand reaches through the gap in the seats and grips his leg, and he takes a steadying breath and swipes his screen to accept his dad’s call. The conversation is fast and hushed, and Santana’s hand leaves his leg as the tension drains from him. 

“I’m nearly there,” he says, as the conversation draws to a close. His dad’s voice in his ears says that they’ll wait for him outside. He’s obscenely thankful to not have to go inside, to not have to smell the inside of the building. He’s not sure when he’ll be ready to face it again, but it’s not tonight. “I love you,” he says, apropos of nothing but the uneasiness he’s struggling against.

“You too, squirt. We’ll get coffee and see you when you get here.”

When his dad hangs up, Blaine feels himself breathe easily for the first time since he heard his dad’s message. His mom is okay, she doesn’t have to stay, there’s nothing wrong. Only a sprained wrist from a tumble down the stairs. Just the last three, not all of them. There’s nothing broken, nothing fractured. She’s okay. He sniffs and swipes at his eyes, and then breathes out slowly as his heart thuds its resting tattoo in his chest.

When he refocuses and takes his headphones out of his ears, Santana is looking at him over her shoulder. Brittany’s eyes find his in her mirror as well, and he smiles for their benefit.

“Good news?” Santana asks gently. Brittany turns the radio down to hear. Blaine grins at them, wide and open and infectious, and Santana’s answering smile has teeth in it too.

“Yeah,” he says, and nods. “Yeah, it is.”

He’s surprised to find he means it.


	3. a sleeping slow despair

iii. _‘a sleeping slow despair’_

For all that his junior year at Dalton settles into its own rhythm, his home life feels like it tail spins. His dad doesn’t pick him up more often than he does on Fridays, and Blaine runs out of excuses to not try out for the Warblers. It will, he figures, give him something to do on a Friday afternoon that’s not sitting in his room or in the library, nursing another coffee and a math induced headache. He’s surprised by how much he enjoys the camaraderie of the group and the creative outlet singing provides. 

When he’s not with the boys from choir, Blaine returns to boxing. After the assault that hospitalised him, and when his doctors advised that his bones were up to it again, Blaine had taken up boxing to feel safer, more able to defend himself. At Dalton, he starts a small club - he will later call it Fight Club, but in the moment, it’s five boys and a lot of anger - and teaches other boys like him to defend themselves. With his hands strapped and a 50lb bag swinging in front of him, Blaine feels powerful and in absolute control of his situation. When it starts to hurts, he can stop. When he hands are bruised and his shoulders throb, he can take off his straps and wash the sweat and the pain away.

He can’t do the same with the slow deterioration of his home life, though. He can’t swing hard enough to erase the suspicions he harbours and can’t confirm. He can’t put his finger on what feels wrong, except to note that his dad smiles more that he has in a long time. He laughs more easily at Blaine’s jokes, spends more time with him when he is around. He comes home later, smelling of soap and looking freshly showered, and he works more Saturday mornings than he has since Blaine was small, but he’s more accessible, _happier_ , than ever. 

Blaine has watched enough Lifetime movies with his mom to see what is happening, but he doesn’t know what to do to change it. Moreover, he doesn’t know if he should.

There comes a Friday in late January, though, where he lays his suspicions on the line. His dad’s car smells of perfume, unfamiliar and heavy with orange and bergamot, when he gets in. He throws his bag in the back and clicks the button to wind the window down, despite the bitter cold outside. His dad doesn’t speak, only backs the car out of the space and drives slowly toward the main road. Blaine maintains the uneasy silence beside him until, slowly, the scent of perfume evaporates, leaving only the bitter chill of winter behind it. Blaine puts the window back up, turns his face to stare at the side of his dad’s.

“Are you leaving?” he says, and his dad glances at him as his fingers tighten on the wheel. Blaine recognises resignation when he sees it. It looks the same on his dad as it looks on him. 

“No,” his dad replies, but he doesn’t turn his face again, doesn’t look directly at Blaine. Blaine hears him, though. He hears, ‘Not yet.’ He hears, ‘You’re young, Blaine. It’s complicated.’ He hears, loud in the lingering silence, ‘I love you’, and knows that it’s not enough. It’s never been enough.

-

Blaine’s parents met in the winter of 1993. Pamela, his mom, had been a divorced mother of one, selling cosmetics door-to-door and hosting parties selling mid-range make-up to marginally tipsy, easily persuaded women. The work had been easy and the hours flexible, and she’d been able to take her young son, Cooper, with her when she couldn’t find a sitter. Truthfully, she enjoyed herself and she was good at what she did, good enough to work her way up to becoming a regional representative. She had the pink car and the can-do personality, and she’d made herself into a success coming out of the messy dissolution of her relationship with Cooper’s dad. She kept a box of wine in the refrigerator, and she enjoyed a glass or two after Cooper was in bed, whilst she wound down with telenovellas that she didn’t always understand. 

The man who would become her second husband, GabrielAnderson, was the son of one of her clients. He’d been charming and handsome, and she hadn’t bothered getting as far as second thoughts when he asked her to go to dinner with him. The yes came out of her mouth faster than her brain could process the question, and, less than a year later, they were married by the county clerk, the slight roundness of Pamela’s belly barely visible beneath the soft folds of her dress. In the February of 1995, she’d given birth to a second son, tiny and perfect, with ten little fingers and ten little toes and huge eyes that stared at her with ancient clarity despite having only hours of experience, and she’d picked Blaine from their agreed list of names. When Gabeheld him for the first time, cooing his name, everything had felt as right as it possibly could.

That was then.

Cooper leaves for college when Blaine is 8, and then changes his mind and moves to California instead, to Los Angeles. He says he’s going to be an actor. That’s what Blaine hears his mom tell his dad, anyway. His dad says that Cooper had better be serious this time, and that he should at least learn a trade to pay his bills, because he’s not going to support his flights of fancy indefinitely. He doesn’t sound angry, really, so much as just exhausted trying to keep up with Cooper, but his mom is defensive all the same. It’s - it’s not the first time Blaine hears his parents argue, but it’s the first time he remembers being scared, the first time he remembers curling up against his mom when his dad leaves, letting her stroke his hair as she cries. When Cooper leaves, Blaine shoulders the burden of his mom’s unhappiness, and doesn’t wonder if Cooper did this as well.

By the time he’s 10, Blaine does wonder if he’s the only thing keeping his parents together, the body holding them in increasingly elliptical orbit. His mom’s circles grow smaller, and his dad’s larger, but both of them are circling around him. When he comes out at 13 and sees the way his dad withdraws, he knows that he’s not the glue holding them together so much as the wedge driving them apart. 

It’s been five years since he told them though, scared of rejection and brave in the face of his own terror, and three since his attack. Now coming up hard on 18, Blaine is certain of just one thing, and it’s that he doesn’t think his mom’s fragile hold on her life will take the blow that he can feel pending. He doesn’t think he can take care of her when it does. 

So he prays. He’s never been devout, but when he remembers to pray, he prays for his mom. At Temple on Saturday mornings, he asks for strength. Driving home again, they stop at the Lima Bean and he treats her to a muffin and a coffee, and they watch her shows together before Blaine settles in to finish his school work. As she cooks dinner, she says, idly and repeatedly, that he’s going to make someone happy one day.

He’d settle for seeing her smile, he thinks.

At school, he throws himself back into his boxing, spends his hours after school with a bag of sand and his fingers taped, and he punches the bag until his hair curls and his breath is short and his shoulders ache. He can’t control what his parents do, and he can’t be everything he wants to be all the while he’s stuck in Ohio, but he can do this and he can do it well. He can make sure he doesn’t get hurt again, that he doesn’t become the reason his parents hang in together for another year, hurting one another as they try not to hurt him. 

-

It’s on a Saturday morning in February, the closest weekend to Valentine’s, that the world tilts a little around him. Blaine stands in line at the Lima Bean, staring at the bent heads of two girls in front of him, one with dark hair tumbling loose down the back of her electric blue leather jacket, the other’s blonde hair tied back in a severe ponytail, red exercise pants sticking out the bottom of a pleated cheerleading skirt. They laugh easily, and Blaine sees their hands clasped together between their thighs, pressed close together to avoid notice. He’s reminded - his brain idly cataloguing the colour of the jacket - of the night of the mixer, of Santana, who’d swooped in like his guardian angel when he’d needed one, and that’s when the blue snaps into real focus. He turns his face away just as Santana glances behind her. 

“Wicket!” she exclaims, and Blaine offers a wonky smile. As names go, it’s not the worst he’s heard shouted at him. Some of those are set in the healed bones of his body, never to be forgotten. Santana rakes her eyes over him, takes in his clothes and the yarmulke stuffed into his pocket and forgotten about. He squares his shoulders defensively. If he’s learned one thing since he was 15, it’s how to avoid getting hit, and how to stop it hurting if he does. She doesn’t mention it, though. Instead, she glances over his shoulder at the door. “Are you here on your own?”

“No,” Blaine says, grips his car keys in his hand. He doesn’t offer anything further, and Santana narrows her eyes at him. Brittany tugs her hand and they take a step closer to the counter. Santana leans into her, whispers in her ear, and Brittany glances back at him, her smile wide, bright, and genuine, and then she nods at Santana, who lets go of her hand and takes a step back to loop her arm through Blaine’s.

“Do you want to stay and split a cookie with us?” she says softly, and Blaine finds that he’s touched. He shakes his head, though.

“I can’t,” he says, and meets the steady brown of her stare. He glances back at the door, and thinks of his mom in the car. “But if you’re -” He starts, and stops, shakes his head. He wants to stay, but it’s been a long time since he’s had friends he saw on weekends. Not since _before_ , and everything had been different then - 

Panic bubbles in his stomach and the line in front of him seems to spread out and stop moving simultaneously, and he doesn’t want coffee anymore. He wrenches his arm free of Santana’s and steps backward away from her. “Nevermind. I should - I should go.” 

Santana catches his hand, her face full of concern. “Hey, Frodo, listen,” she says, her voice calming as his brain freewheels. “Britt and I are going to be here for at least another hour. If you change your mind.”

Blaine nods, and then bolts without either his coffee or his mom’s cake. 

Outside, he stops to breathe. He hasn’t had anyone who knows him, really knows him, since he left West Lima, when he’d learned that friends don’t stick around when you need them the most. In a year, he is leaving Lima altogether. He just needs to make it through his junior year, and to the end of his senior one. He walks slowly back toward the car and his mom, slides into the seat beside her and leans his head against her shoulder. 

“The line was long,” he says by way of excuse, although he can see it moving through the polish of the glass. He watches as Santana and Brittany take their drinks and find a table, and he turns his face into his mom as he always has. She strokes his hair and his shoulder, and kisses his ear. 

“You can stay with your friends, Blaine,” she says, her voice gentle and clear this morning. He looks up and shakes his head. 

“No,” he says. “Let me get you home. We can make lunch.” 

She takes the car keys from his hand and shakes her head. “Stay with your friends.”

Blaine looks back at the warm gold of the Lima Bean, inviting in the cold of the lot, and then at his mom. She gestures for him to go, and he drops a kiss on her cheek and his yarmulke on the seat, grabs his own coat from the back of the car and jogs back across the lot to the coffee shop. Santana looks up as he approaches their table, and pushes half a cookie toward him.

“We didn’t know what you drink,” Brittany says, and Blaine lowers himself to a chair. Out of the window, he watches his car drive away, and he rests his chin on the heel of his hand. 

“Plain drip,” he says, “With cinnamon.” 

Santana pushes her chair back and heads for the counter, and Blaine breaks the corner off of the cookie and chews it slowly. It’s a strange feeling that spreads in his chest, but it feels a little like it could be friendship and a lot like acceptance.


	4. this is a wasteland now

iv. _‘this is a wasteland now’_

If there’s one thing Blaine does understand about both his and Santana’s defensive spikiness, it’s that it’s caused - in part, at least - by the fierce loneliness of their isolation. They don’t fit in the spaces they inhabit, for all that they can learn to assimilate. To pretend.

Blaine came to Dalton Academy a year later than his peers, and a year older. He came bruised and broken and held back, repeating the year he’d missed half of and scared, initially, of anyone suspecting that he was gay. Dalton’s zero tolerance policy was a fine theory, but he’d had no reason to believe in its truth. Afterall, his friends and his teachers at West Lima had promised he would be fine taking a boy to the annual Sadie Hawkins dance, that there would be no repercussions, and had then left the two of them alone to wait for a ride that came twenty minutes too late. Blaine has heard affirmations of safety for a long time, and doesn’t remotely believe they’re real. 

Meeting Santana, getting to know her on their shared journeys from Westerville to Lima on Friday afternoons, is the first time he’s understood what it is to not be alone in his loneliness. Santana drives her own car, and she meets him at the gates when his practice with the Warblers finishes, wolf whistles him in his private school blazer and laughs low and dirty when he slips it from his shoulders and throws it in the car with his bags and his books. She drives as fast as traffic and weather will allow, and she lets Blaine fiddle with the radio to find a station he approves of, and she talks. She’s angry in all of the ways that Blaine is. She’s angry that loving Brittany means she can’t be with her. She’s angry that a straight boy thought it was okay to just out her when she wasn’t ready to say the words herself. She’s angry that her school was so incapable of keeping her safe, of taking the threats made to her seriously, that she had to transfer - that her dad _made_ her transfer - to Crawford, with its uniform and its strictly enforced policies of tolerance and acceptance, in order to graduate safely. 

She’s angry that loving Brittany compromises her safety at all.

And Blaine understands every word, because who he is didn’t change when he realised - when Google and a painful crush on Dr Doug Ross had helped him to understand - that he was gay, and yet everything around him changed completely. He understands how it feels to be removed from everything that’s familiar and transplanted somewhere that you don’t belong. But Santana is different. She doesn’t want to fit in at Crawford. She has no interest in Crawford’s sports teams, in their activities and mixers, and she’s full of bitter and futile rage. 

They have a standing date on Saturday afternoons. Blaine meets her and Brittany, or sometimes just her, at the Lima Bean. They get coffee and a cookie, and then they drive across town (“Did you ever watch Buffy?” Santana asks, as downtown becomes out of town in a succession of rapidly degenerating blocks, and Blaine nods. Santana offers a vampish grin. “We don’t have a whole lot of town either,” she observes, and Blaine snorts an undignified laugh. “We also don’t have a club where an impressive parade of indie bands play one night only shows,” he says, and Santana laughs with him. “Shame,” she says, “Bet we’ve got the cockroaches though.”) to the mall, where they spend the rest of the day, until they both agree that calculus doesn’t do itself, and they head to one or the other of their houses and bury themselves in books. If there’s one thing they both know, it’s that getting out of Ohio means graduating first.

It’s lying on Santana’s bed, his head resting on her leg as she paints her nails crimson red, that she says, still griping about her dad’s decision to send her to Crawford, “It’s like sticking a lesbian in St Trinians.” Blaine stares up at her, and at the blood red of her nails, and she continues, “Although she’d probably at least get lucky there. Not that the schoolgirl thing does it for me.” She pauses and sighs, “It’s hell with pleats.”

“And no Russell Brand,” Blaine says. Santana stops blowing on her nails to stare at him, and then she barks a laugh that comes from her core, rocking her backwards and tipping his head from her thigh. He pushes himself upright and her hand grips his forearm as she laughs.

Once her breathing is under control, she says, “Is it the hair or the tattoos?”

“His thighs don’t hurt,” Blaine says, imagines - as he has many times before - his face between them, and Santana keeps grinning at him.

“Wanky,” she says, and Blaine arches an eyebrow and shrugs a coy shoulder. “Oh my fucking - kinky, Anderson. I knew I liked you for a reason. It’s always the quiet ones.” 

They base their friendship on their mutual sense of alienation, on their shared anger and frustration, and on Santana’s willingness to admire the way 18 year old boys look in blazers that aren’t cut to accommodate their changing bodies. 

And, at their next mixer, Santana tells Blaine he can be her wingman. Neither of them says it out loud, but going with one another is another kind of safety net. 

-

In April, Cooper Anderson makes one of his rare visits to Lima. “I didn’t want to miss my baby brother’s birthday,” he says, throwing his arm around Blaine and rifling his fingers in his hair. Blaine scowls and ducks away, flattens his hair again as best he can.

“My birthday was February,” he says, and Cooper shrugs. 

“But I have the date right, right?”

He doesn’t, but Blaine’s not surprised. It doesn’t really matter anyway, because their mom is happy to see Cooper. Cooper engulfs her in a hug that makes her laugh, her face lighting up as she hugs him back, and then he swoops her out of the house and into his car. Blaine stares at the back of the closed front door and fights not to cry. It’s just how Cooper is, and Blaine’s never going to be enough to hold his attention for long. He’s not going to fight Cooper for their mom’s attention, for her love. He’s here when she cries, when she needs help climbing the stairs, when she falls asleep on the couch. He’s here when she makes dinner, when she sits with him and offers to help with his school work, when she makes a clear space beside her for them to watch her shows, when she invites him to talk about who he likes these days. If he had to fight, he thinks, perhaps, he’d win, but he doesn’t _know_ and he shouldn’t have to try.

What hurts more is his dad. With Cooper in Lima for the week, his dad makes the effort to be home earlier, to be around more. He engages with Cooper, talks to him about his work, about what he’s doing, and Blaine tries not to take it personally. All it feels like, though, is another subtle reminder that Blaine might be his son, but he’s not the son his dad wanted to have. Cooper is - Cooper is magnetic, and handsome. He’s charming, and personable, and - and Cooper’s also straight.

Blaine doesn’t say anything as he slips down the stairs and out of the house, his car keys in his hand and his phone to his ear. Santana agrees to meet him at Breadstix - “They’re like, legally not allowed to stop bringing you breadsticks,” she says, and Blaine says he’s not sure that that many carbs are good for anyone, and he can _hear_ Santana roll her eyes at him - and that’s that. He backs his car off of the drive, careful to avoid Cooper’s sloppily parked rental, and he leaves. His parents can play happy families with the son they do want, and Blaine will leave them to it.

It’s a little before 6 when his dad calls him, and Blaine answers with a promise that he’ll be home soon, and that he’s fine with whatever takeout Cooper has decided they should eat. He knows he’s bitter, and he knows his dad can hear it. 

“Blaine,” his dad says, the warning loud in his voice. “Bud, don’t - your mom doesn’t get to see both of you often, and I don’t want your brother to worry that something’s wrong.”

“Cooper wouldn’t notice unless you pointed at him and yelled,” Blaine says. He’s done even trying to enjoy Cooper’s presence and he knows everything is wrong, but his dad’s laugh surprises him nonetheless. 

“Anyway, your mom and your brother have decided we should eat out tonight. How do you feel about Breadstix?” 

Blaine, still full of breadsticks and Coke and able to see the glowing sign from where he sits with Santana and Brittany on the hood of Brittany’s car, says that sounds fine - cheap, but fine - and his dad ends his call with a promise to meet him there in thirty minutes. Blaine stares at his phone for a minute, and turns it over in his hands. Brittany pulls his hood up over his head and he smiles at her. 

“You looked like you needed some privacy,” she says. It almost makes sense, he supposes, insofar as she ever does.

-

Cooper, of course, arrives early. Santana whistles low when Cooper strides past them, minor celebrity not exactly what they’re used to in Lima, and Cooper removes the sunglasses that he’s wearing despite the dark and the hour and heads toward them. 

“Ladies,” he says, his smile a little too bright in the darkness, Blaine not even an afterthought, curled into himself in the shadow of Santana and Brittany. “Do you want me to sign anything? Selfie?” 

Santana’s grin is wolfish, all vamp and polish as she pushes herself to her feet and rearranges her tiny dress and her socks. She pulls her hair out of the collar of her jacket and then her phone out of her bra. “Really?” she says, and Blaine can hear in her voice that she doesn’t want to be as impressed as she is by Cooper. “Would you? Britt, come here.” 

Brittany pats Blaine’s knee and asks if he wants in quietly, and he shakes his head, no. He’s got a lot of pictures of him and Cooper. He’ll let them have this one. She frowns at him and cants her head, clearly confused, but she lets it go and stands the other side of Cooper. He takes Santana’s phone and she kisses his cheek as he takes the picture. The surprise on his face is real if nothing else is, and Blaine snorts a laugh that gets his attention, finally.

“Squirt!” he calls enthusiastically, and gestures for Blaine stand up and hug him. Blaine does, reticence in every line of his body. 

“Don’t,” he says, and falters, and then steels himself. “Don’t call me that, Coop. It wasn’t cute when we were kids, and it’s not cute now.” 

Cooper raises his eyebrows and slings his arm around Blaine’s shoulders, knuckles his hair. Blaine shrugs him off and scowls at the ground.

“Wait,” Santana says, and gestures between them, makes air quotes with her fingers. “‘When we were kids.’ Blaine, have you been holding out on us here?”

He shakes his head and rolls his eyes. “Meet Cooper Anderson,” he says, and then qualifies it with, “My big brother.” 

Brittany looks between them, eyes narrow and confused. “You don’t look alike,” she says eventually, and Cooper glances at Blaine. 

“Blaine’s adopted,” Cooper says, and Blaine punches him in the arm.

“Cooper’s my half-brother,” he says, and then, “If it helps, he actually is adopted. My dad-”

“They don’t care, Blaine, don’t bore them. Ladies, would you like to join us for a drink?”

Santana shrugs a shoulder, and Brittany only looks at Blaine. He forces a smile and says they have time before his parents arrive, if they want to share a drink. Brittany nods her head, and Santana takes her hand, and Blaine quietly reminds Cooper that they are, in fact, 18 years old and the drink they will be sharing is soft and fizzy, and Cooper says, sotto voce, that he’s not sure if Blaine’s realised that his friends are girls and that’s not how 18 year old gay boys usually get laid. Blaine feels the ice that runs down his spine and snaps it straight. Falling back a step, he reenters Breadstix behind Santana and Brittany, silently hoping this nightmare will end. 

It doesn’t, not even when he pinches his thigh.

-

It’s after Cooper leaves town - an audition, he says, as he packs his bags with most of his things and some of Blaine’s, who tells him as much and only gets a smile and a pat on the head - that Santana and Brittany tell him about the Cooper Anderson Experience at McKinley, back when those ads he makes had first premiered. 

“Everyone thought he was super hot,” Santana says. “I didn’t get it. I mean, he’s cute, but he’s not all that?” 

“Says the girl who couldn’t wait to get her selfie?” Blaine asks bitterly, playing with the hem of his jacket, rubbing his thumb over the worn leather until Brittany takes his hand in hers and holds it. 

“Oh shut up,” Santana says, her voice rich with laughter. “Like you seriously wouldn’t have leapt at the chance to have tangible evidence to torment your friends with?” 

“To be fair,” Britt says, squeezing his hand now, his bones creaking against each other in her grip. “He’s his brother and we didn’t know.” 

Santana thinks about it for a second, and then says, “Well anyway, imagine how our friends will feel. Half of them have or have had that jingle as their ringtone, and now-” She pauses and plays a voice memo that Blaine never heard her record. Maybe it was whilst he was lurking in the bathroom, taking longer to wash his hands than hygiene or propriety required of him. Either way, she now has a voice memo of Cooper saying ‘This is serious. A man in a dress is _dead_ ’ set as her message alert. Reclaiming his hand from Brittany’s grip, Blaine buries his face in his palms. 

“I hate both of you,” he says, his voice muffled by his hands. Santana’s laughter is familiar and comforting, and Brittany kisses the shell of his ear, which he feels burning. 

“You should have just told us,” she says, and Blaine leans into her, accepts her arm around his shoulder and the softness of her body when he leans his cheek against her chest.

He would have, he thinks, but Cooper is just another transient part of his life, one more thing that enters and leaves and creates vacuums in his wake. Cooper is, like his dad and like his friends, one more thing that leaves Blaine behind when the reality of him is inconvenient, and he doesn’t want that feeling to sully what he has. “Yeah,” he says, his voice low and full of regret. “Maybe. Just - don’t hold him against me, yeah?”

“Never,” Brittany says, and hugs him against her side.


	5. there are days in this life

v. _‘there are days in this life’_

With May comes Santana’s graduation. For all that it’s bittersweet, Blaine finds that he is happy for her, even as it only compounds his own sadness. That should be him this year, but someone else’s insecurity has him still finishing his junior year. Santana, though, is out - out of the restrictive, oppressive atmosphere of high school and out of Lima. She has a place at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. She’s getting the hell out of Ohio. 

Blaine sits with her mom and Brittany and they applaud as she crosses the stage and takes her diploma, completes the ritual required of her before resuming her place with her class. Beside him, her mom wipes a tear away and Blaine offers her a hug and a tissue, both of which she accepts. He’s surprised by the catch in his own chest, and by the swoop of his heart. Santana has been - she’s been one of the things that has buoyed him through the year, and now he has to face his senior year alone again. 

He says as much to her, sitting with her and Britt in the shadow of the library later, sharing a dismantled burrito from the one place Santana insists isn’t completely terrible. She tells him to worry less. It’s only Kentucky. She’ll be home to see Britt as well, because Britt’s not graduating either, and she’s heard weird things about the water, so she’ll also be back to do her laundry. “And really, I don’t have that many panties or bras,” she says. “So I’ll be home like, all the time.” Blaine knows she’s shooting for levity, but the morose reality of being Friendless In Ohio isn’t letting him smile. 

“Besides,” she says, when he doesn’t respond. “There’s this thing now called The Internet? You can FaceTime me when you’re lonely.”

“Kinky,” he says, automatically. And then, “Is that the name of your sex tape?”

“No,” Brittany says around a mouthful of rice, which she covers with her hand and swallows hastily. “But you can totally find that on the internet too.”

Blaine blinks at them both, and then the grin bubbles up inside of him, regardless of the emotional wasteland stretching dry as the Mojave before him, bursting onto his face with a huff of laughter. He drops his chin to his chest and wraps his hands around his knees and lets himself laugh until there are tears in his eyes. When he stops, when he’s wiped his face and the laughter is only a feeling of quiet inside of him, he says he’s not even sure he wants to know. He can appreciate that they’re beautiful, but on a sliding scale he has limited desire to see them fuck. 

“‘Limited’?” Santana says, making air quotes with her fingers, and Blaine feels the blush that colours his cheeks. 

“Or none,” he says, and Brittany - always Brittany - looks at the two of them and says she’d watch them fuck, and that’s it. Blaine is laughing again, and Santana snorts, and Brittany grins at them both, and the burrito and the sadness are gone.

-

Once he’s home, though, and it’s just him and his mom settled in for dinner and TV, his thoughts roll back around to the upcoming year. The weight of it starts to settle on his shoulders and his chest, and he catalogues all the things that will necessarily be different with Santana gone, and it’s only a little after 9pm when he says he’s going to go to bed. His mom presses the back of her fingers to his forehead, her eyes concerned, and in her face he sees the same fear and sadness he sees in his own reflection. It’s just another reminder of the things he can’t change and can’t take back.

“Are you okay, Blainey?” she asks, the name a hangover from when he was tiny and she could tuck him on her hip. He nods his head and pulls away, pushes himself to his feet.

“Yeah,” he says, “I’m good, just a little tired. It’s been a weird day.”

“Do you want me to make you tea?” 

He shakes his head and gestures the door. “No, I just want to sleep.”

She nods her head, but she looks concerned so he gives her a quick hug before grabbing his bag and leaving, taking the stairs two a time and closing his bedroom door behind him. He leans back against it, thunks his head off of his school blazer hanging on the back of it, and lets the emotion of the day close his throat. It won’t be so different, he knows, to the time before he knew Santana, but the last few months have been some of the best since the incident. Since he’d been sent to Dalton. From now on, there won’t be anyone at the gate on Fridays to bring him home, to bitch with him about the things that don’t fit, to laugh with him about the dramatics of self-governed show choir. (Santana still doesn’t believe that there’s an actual gavel involved.) She’ll come back for Britt, but Blaine’s not her boyfriend. They’ll forget him, the way people do. 

He turns off all the lights and buries himself in his bed, wrapped up in the sheets as he lets himself be overwhelmed and alone. When he finally puts his phone on to charge the following morning, a red bubble appears in his messages with the number 15 in it, the last message from Santana being, ‘Someone should find whoever hurt you first and staple their feet to the floor. Call me back, please.’ It makes him smile, and then he feels the smile wobble and crumple, because where would they start? Blaine’s life is full of person shaped voids, and all of them hurt a little, but which one came first - 

Perhaps Cooper, whom Blaine had wanted so much to impress when he was barely toddling, and who’d only ever responded with what Blaine did wrong? Or perhaps his dad, whom Blaine loves but who’d responded to his coming out with a busted ‘59 Chevy that they’d spent the summer repairing, as if oil and grease could change him? 

But, he thinks, when it comes to his fear that Santana will forget him once she has new friends, perhaps the void that’s consuming him is the one created by his old friends, who’d sent a card to the hospital and then slowly petered out of his life when he couldn’t stay out past dark, and when he’d flinched from their touch if he didn’t see it coming. Friendship requires work and vigilance, and constant reinforcement, and they can’t maintain that across state lines. 

He pulls an old sweater from the chest at the foot of his bed, tugs the sleeves down over his hands and wraps his arms around himself. What’s one more year alone anyway? He can make it. He always has.

-

His dad says he wants to take him to dinner. Just the two of them, he says. Blaine is suspicious, but he agrees so long as it’s not Breadstix. He’s had enough $10 pasta to last him the rest of his life, and Gabe laughs. 

“There’s a Pinoy place in Fairborn,” he says. “How does that strike you?”

Fairborn strikes Blaine as a long way to go for a simple meal with his dad, and he’s suspicious of the motives, but the idea of food he didn’t have to call his lola to get a recipe for sounds worth the journey. He nods his head and fixes a smile on his face, and his dad squeezes his shoulder. 

“I’ll make sure it’s booked,” he says. “Keep this Friday free, Blaine. Please.”

“Sure,” Blaine says, and thinks, It’s not as if he has a diary that’s overflowing. His only other plans are movie night with Santana and Brittany, possibly with cheap vodka and popcorn, if Santana can get any, and talking about blowjobs and sex tips until Blaine reminds them, again, that one of them has had sex with precisely no boys. (“Honey,” Santana’ll say again, kissing him between his eyebrows, leaving the smudged red print of her lips behind. “You’ve never fucked a girl either. And let me tell you, making a girl come is a whole lot more work than letting one of you guys go at it.” And they’ll laugh, and pass out drunk in a heap of pajamas and skin and happiness.) The weeks until Santana leaves may be running down more quickly than he’d like, but one week for dinner with his dad he can accommodate. 

They drive in silence, initially, Blaine quiet in the passenger seat, Gabe gripping the steering wheel with both hands until they pass out of Lima’s city limits. “You can put your music on, if you want?” Gabe says, and Blaine starts and then sets about syncing his phone with his dad’s car. He hums along for a while, until Wham comes up and his dad laughs softly and glances at him and then back at the road.

“Did I ever tell you about my friend Nicky?” he says. Blaine shakes his head.

“No,” he says, and turns the music down. His dad is silent for a long minute, listening to the song playing quietly. He looks pensive, and then he exhales slowly and turns his head to look at Blaine, searching his face for something.

“I should have,” he says, and resumes staring ahead. Blaine waits a moment, and then, when his dad shows no sign of saying anything further, reaches to turn the music back up again. Gabe pushes his hand away, and says, “You’d have liked him, I think. If there’s one thing I wish I could change, it would be that. Because he could probably have helped both of us.”

“Dad?”

“Nicky was one of my best friends through grade school and into high school,” Gabe says, and Blaine thinks that that has to be a lie, because his dad has never even said his name before this. “We were inseparable. When Nicky took an interest in soccer, we both started playing. When I made the swim team, Nicky trained with me. I encouraged him to ask out his first girlfriend, and I was - I was the first person he told, when he came out.”

Blaine rocks back in his seat, turns his music off altogether and holds his phone in both hands in his lap. “I don’t understand,” he says, slowly. “When I -”

“I know,” Gabe says, bites his lip and flexes his fingers. “Nicky was terrified. It was the 80s, and we didn’t understand. He didn’t know how I’d react. Christ, Blaine. I didn’t know how I’d react. But I knew one thing for sure. This was the same kid I’d been friends with since we were five years old, who I’d been to camp with pretty much every summer, and that didn’t have to change.”

“Something changed,” Blaine says, and can’t keep the bitterness from his voice this time. He sees again the way his dad’s demeanour changed that afternoon, the way he’d withdrawn and disappeared into himself when Blaine had asked him if he could talk to him, when they’d closed the door to his dad’s office space and Blaine had said, haltingly, that he was gay, that he didn’t have a boyfriend or anything but that he knew as clearly as he knew his own name that he liked boys. He sees the glassy look in his dad’s eyes when he blinks, and knows their relationship has never really recovered.

“Nicky left for college,” his dad says softly. “We both left for college, promised we’d stay in touch, and we’d come back here on our breaks.”

“And?” Blaine prompts, and his dad swallows hard and shakes his head, the curls Blaine has inherited from him falling over his forehead. 

“Winter break of our third year,” his dad says. “I got a call from his mom instead of him to say Nicky wouldn’t be coming home. I didn’t think much of it. He told me he had a - a boyfriend, at college. I asked her when he’d be back next, and that’s when she started crying, when she told me that Nicky was dead. And when you - I was scared, Blaine. When you told me you were gay, all I could think about was Nicky and how he died and how hard his life was because of this thing he couldn’t change, and I wanted you to be sure, to be absolutely certain, because your life was going to be hard, and possibly short, and when I saw you lying there in that hospital bed, I knew it was happening again, only this time I had to watch it.” He stops talking, exhales sharp and hard through his nose and swallows hard. Blaine sits in silence, tears in his own eyes that he swipes at with his hands, angry and hurting.

“Why didn’t you say?” he asks, his voice quiet to avoid breaking around the lump he can feel balling in his chest and his throat.

“Because you’re not him,” his dad says. “And I wanted to do for you all the things I couldn’t do for him, and I still couldn’t protect you. So then there was Dalton, and it’s all I can do to stop it happening again.” 

“I’m not going to die,” Blaine says, and his dad shakes his head again, vehement and certain.

“No,” he says. “You’re not.”

They don’t make it as far as Fairborn. They stop at a roadside diner instead, and fill up on burgers and fries, and Blaine pretends not to notice when his dad slips away to make a phone call. He drinks his milkshake and leans his elbows on the table and wishes fervently that he could change the past for all of them.


	6. living on roofs made from sin

vi. _‘living on roofs made from sin’_

The same week that Santana leaves, Gabriel Anderson takes Blaine to Breadstix and explains, over overcooked chicken parmesan, what Blaine has known for months. He’s leaving. He has to leave. He loves Blaine’s mom, but - 

“Sometimes love isn’t enough,” he says, and Blaine stares at the checked vinyl table covering, wonders if there’s a correct response to this news. He frowns, and he shakes his head.

“Is it me?” he asks, because he knows things have been difficult, since he was beaten and broken, since his mom’s drinking got worse. Gabe is quick to shake his head, to still the hand Blaine is using to push chicken listlessly around his plate with his own.

“No,” he reassures. “It’s been hard for a long time. We probably should never have married to begin with, but your mom -” 

Blaine knows. His mom was pregnant, and liable to become the single mother of two children, and his dad was raised Catholic at least, was never going to leave his mom literally holding the baby. “So it was me,” he says, and then, “Is there - you’re seeing someone, right?”

If nothing else, his dad doesn’t lie to him this time. “Yeah,” he says. “A woman from -” 

Blaine blanches and shakes his head. “I don’t - ” he says. He pulls his hand from his dad’s, takes a giant gulp of cola, and then motions for a waitress. “I don’t want details, Dad. I don’t think I can -” He pushes himself up and away from the table, grabs his jacket and his phone and says, “I’ll wait outside.” 

Once he can breathe again, warm air heavy in his lungs and burning his his throat, Blaine pulls his hood up over his head and pulls his jacket tight around him, his hands deep in his pockets. He thinks, usually he’d call Santana and they’d go hang out in the park whilst he got everything he needed to off of his chest, but he doesn’t have that, not anymore. 

He doesn’t have anything.

Everything is falling apart, and he wonders how much further it can crumble.

He can have no idea.

-

His dad moves out, officially, the first week of August. The afternoon is muggy, close and uncomfortable, and Blaine can feel his t-shirt sticking to his skin as he helps him with the last boxes. Gabe leans against the trunk when they close it, stares at Blaine for a moment, and then at the ground between them.

“If it gets too much,” he says, and Blaine makes a noise through his nose, derisive and hurt. His dad pastes a smile on his face and looks up at the windows. 

Blaine follows his gaze and sees the curtain settle in the window of his mom’s bedroom. She hasn’t left it in two days, not since Gabe packed his clothes into a suitcase and told her that he was moving into the apartment he keeps in Columbus for when his work days run long. Blaine lay in bed that night, fighting the urge to get up and check on her when he heard the crash of her perfume bottles and the click of her door. He listened to her pad downstairs and waited for her to come back up, and finally, when the digits on his clock announced in bright red lines two inches tall that it was 4.04am and he still wasn’t asleep, he got up and headed downstairs after her, his robe open and both his pyjamas and his hair skewed. His mom was sitting on the couch, coffee and vodka on the table in front of her, two sleeping pills next to her mug, and she glanced up at him as he entered the room, eyes red rimmed and bloodshot. He took the mug from her and refilled it with water, helped her with her tablets, and then put her back to bed in the spare room. At 4.30am, he rearranged her perfume on her dressing table, and removed what he could of his dad’s presence, and stored the resulting box under his own bed. At 5am, he drifted off into an uneasy sleep, and at 7am, he got himself up again and checked on his mom. The spare bedroom was empty, but she was fast asleep in her own bed. He drew her covers up over her and checked her breathing. She hasn’t left the room since, although Blaine has taken her food and tea and tablets.

“We’ll be fine,” he says, and Gabe’s mouth becomes a flat line as he nods his head.

“Yeah,” he replies. “But you know how to get hold of me if you need help.”

“Sure,” Blaine says, and thinks, if he really cared, he wouldn’t be leaving.

It takes him two days to think perhaps he’s been uncharitable, because caring for his mom, loving her, isn’t enough to save her from herself most days, and it takes him two weeks to finally break down and call his brother, exhausted and emotional and close to tears.

“Dad’s left,” he says, hunched into the corner of his room, his phone pressed to his face and his knees pressed to his chest. “Dad’s left, and I don’t - I don’t know how to make her better.”

“Is she still drinking?” Cooper asks, as if it’s just another Wednesday in the Anderson household and not the end of the world as Blaine knows it. Blaine doesn’t want to cry, but he can’t help it, his voice breaking on the affirmation, and Cooper makes a noise at the other end of the line, not of derision but of sympathy, of solidarity. It’s the first time Blaine wonders what the years before his dad looked like, and why Cooper had really left.

“She’s just - she barely moves, Coop. She eats a little, sleeps a lot, and I don’t - I don’t know what to do?” He stares blindly at the back of his closed bedroom door, thinks about the dead expanse of house the other side of it, about keeping it running as if everything is fine. Tries not to think about the way their neighbours look at him when he takes the trash out, about the sympathy casserole in the refrigerator, as if he can’t feed himself, as if someone had _died_ , not just left - 

“Try not to panic,” Cooper says into the spiral of despair he’s circling, and Cooper sounds the most like an older brother he ever has. “I’ll book a flight home.”

“Love you,” Blaine says, and means it. Cooper’s silence is deafening before he hangs up.

-

Three days later, Cooper arrives in the middle of the night. He texted Blaine from the airport in LA to let him know he was on his way, and Blaine said he’d leave the door unlocked for him. As it transpires, Blaine hasn’t made it as far as his bedroom when Cooper arrives. He’s sitting cross-legged on the couch, socked feet tucked up under his knees, with his iPad on his lap and a movie playing quietly on the TV. He looks up when the door opens, and the relief that settles over him when Cooper comes through the door makes him feel like a child. 

“Hey, squirt,” Cooper says, standing his carry-on by the door and shrugging his jacket from his shoulders. Blaine pushes himself slowly to his feet, and then - propriety be damned - throws himself into Cooper’s embrace, wrapping his arms around him and holding him close, warm and solid and real, just to make sure he’s actually there. Cooper’s returned hug is tentative, but grows firmer when Blaine doesn’t let go, when his shoulders start to sag and his breath shortens, as he starts to cry the tears he hasn’t let himself have since his dad drove away - 

“Hey, hey,” Cooper takes his shoulders and pushes him back so he can see his face, and Blaine stares at the floor, wet eyelashes sticking together and dampening his cheeks with each rapid blink, his breath hitching. “Let’s get you to bed as well, hey?” Cooper says, and Blaine snorts a wet laugh and swipes at his eyes with his hands.

“I need to make up the spare room,” he says, although all he really has to do is tuck the sheets in and turn them down. He changed the linen earlier. “And - do you want tea, before bed?”

“Blaine, go to bed,” Cooper says. He lets go of his shoulders and turns off the TV. Behind him, Blaine stares blankly at the wall. Cooper pushes him toward the door. “We can sort everything out tomorrow. I can make a bed.” Blaine stumbles forward a step, and then stops, turns slowly.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he says. It takes a lot to get the words past his lips, but it’s true. He’s glad to see his brother for the first time since Cooper left home. He moves to hug him once more before grabbing his case from the door and trudging up the stairs to his bedroom, dropping Cooper’s stuff in the spare room on his way past.

-

Blaine doesn’t expect Cooper to be a cure all, to fix everything that is wrong. He just needs someone to help him do the things he’s never had to. He wakes early and showers quietly, and heads silently down the stairs to start breakfast. His mom hasn’t eaten since lunch the day before, and he thinks he can maybe tempt her with fresh fruit and coffee, if she’s awake. 

Cooper is sitting at the kitchen table, his hair sleep mussed and his eyes still tired, surrounded by mail, his iPad propped up in front of him. He reaches for another envelope, and nudges the coffee cup resting precariously close to the edge of the table. A little too close, as it turns out. It crashes to the floor, chips of ceramic scattering and coffee bursting brown across the tiles. He swears, soft but vitriolic, and shoves his chair backwards. Blaine heads silently for the mop, and leaves the dustpan on top of the kitchen island for Cooper. 

“Did I wake you?” Cooper asks, and Blaine looks up, surprised. 

“What? No. I came to make breakfast. Did you eat?”

Cooper checks the time - almost 7.30 - and shakes his head. “My brain thinks it’s the middle of the night,” he says. “I’m sort of used to running on coffee, green tea, and acai.”

“Yeah,” Blaine says with a smile. “Mom always worries you’re losing weight.”

Cooper sweeps his gaze over Blaine, who is vanishing under the pressure of keeping his life running, and smiles sadly. “I’m doing okay, kiddo. You, though. You look like you could use a break.” 

Blaine ducks beneath the counter again to find the disinfectant, and to hide his own embarrassment. He takes a shaky breath and then, when he stands back up, “Where am I going to go, Coop?”

Cooper takes the mop from him, and the disinfectant, and sets about clearing the floor of coffee, picking the larger pieces of ceramic mug up and sweeping the smaller pieces into the dustpan to be thrown away. “Could you stay with Dad?” he says, and Blaine huffs a laugh that edges on hysteria. “Or - come out to California, if Dad’s not an option.”

“Someone needs to stay here,” Blaine says. “We can’t both leave her.”

A cloud passes over Cooper’s face and then he says, “I didn’t mean to leave you, you know that, right? I just - it was impossible to stay.”

Blaine doesn’t answer, just gets three mugs from the cupboard and turns the coffee pot back on. That ship is but a memory now, almost legend it’s so long gone. The fact is, Cooper did leave him, and so did his dad. Cooper’s hand on his shoulder catches his unaware, and he flinches away from it, the way he does from any touch he doesn’t see now, makes himself smaller and more invisible. Cooper’s hand disappears, and Blaine looks at him.

“I’m sorry,” Cooper says, and Blaine’s smile is tight.

“You couldn’t have changed anything if you’d been here,” he says. “Can you - can you take Mom’s breakfast up? She might eat, for you.”

Cooper nods, and Blaine sets about cutting up fruit and making her coffee. Cooper puts a flower in a glass, as if they’re both still children, and Blaine offers a fragile smile as he stands everything on a tray. It’s worth a try. She might eat, for Cooper, and he’ll try hard not to be bitter about it.

-

Their mom pads down the stairs just as they finish making lunch. She brings her tray with her, her plate empty. The vase with the flower is missing, and she says it was pretty, so she left it on her window ledge. A little part of the waning summer brought inside. She puts her plate in the dishwasher, and, standing, pulls her hair off of her face with an elastic. Her skin looks clearer than it has in days, and her eyes brighter. Blaine is mostly just relieved to see her dressed. 

Cooper says he needs to speak to her, and the look he gives him makes Blaine nervous. They disappear into what was Gabe’s office, and Blaine, rather than drifting aimlessly around the house by himself, takes his school books and his iPad and drives himself across town to the Lima Bean and then the library. When he gets home, his mom has gone back to bed, and Cooper has his jacket on.

“Come on, squirt,” he says. “I’ll buy you dinner.” Blaine frowns.

“Don’t - don’t call me that,” he says, and Cooper forces a smile.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and actually sounds like he means it, although Blaine isn’t sure he means the nickname so much as the last ten years. Apprehension pooling in in his gut, Blaine pulls the zip on his jacket up to his throat and wraps his arms around himself. Cooper bounces the keys to his rental in his hand and glances back up the stairs, and then turns Blaine around and pushes him out of the front door.

They’re halfway across town when Cooper breaks the ominous silence, staring straight ahead out the front window of the car, as if he can’t look at Blaine. The air between them in thin, crackling with static, more tense even than the set of Cooper’s shoulders. 

“You can’t stay at Dalton,” he says, the words jumbling together on the exhale of his held breath. “Not with Dad gone. There’s no way - Mom can’t get you there, and Dad can’t - there’s no money, Blaine.”

The silence that has been rushing out from him crashes back in, roaring down toward him, a white wave of inevitability. Blaine doesn’t speak; he can’t. What words are there? He nods his head instead, and then turns it to stare blindly out of the window whilst he drowns. His heart pounds in his ears and, if Cooper keeps speaking, he doesn’t hear. He doesn’t see much either, not until the car is pulling into a parking lot and his door is opening, and Cooper is crouching on the asphalt as Blaine tumbles from the car into his arms, panic closing his throat and making it hard to breathe as he digs his fingers into the fabric of Cooper’s jacket and buries his face against him.

As he calms down, he feels Cooper’s hand rubbing circles into his spine, and his fingers spasm and unlock, releasing Cooper slowly. He sits back, tired suddenly, drained, and Cooper looks at him, the impossible blue of his eyes worried. “You with me, kiddo?” he asks, his voice quiet, and Blaine nods his head briefly.

“Yeah,” he says, and then, “Can we get take out? I don’t -”

“Sure,” Cooper says, and then, “I’m sorry.”

There’s nothing to be sorry for, Blaine knows. None of this is actually Cooper’s fault. But he nods his head and accepts it anyway, swings his legs back into the car and says he wants Mexican food, and he knows where they can get it. Cooper doesn’t speak again, except to ask Blaine what he wants and to check that he’s really, really okay.

Blaine’s really, really not. But he smiles and says he’s fine, and Cooper knows better than to push.


	7. i had my doubts little girl

vii. _‘i had my doubts little girl’_

Cooper stays a week. He goes through mountains of paperwork, the glasses he needs to read balanced on the end of his nose, the computer open on the table next to him. By the time he’s packing to leave, Pamela is making it back downstairs on a daily basis. Cooper says he can stay longer if they need him to, but Pamela shushes him and tells him he has his own life to get back to. He should go. Blaine wants to ask him to stay, but knows that his mom is right - Cooper has a life and a career in California. It’s time for him to go.

Before he leaves, Cooper impresses upon Blaine that he should call him, come visit him. He’s only a phone call away, any time. Blaine agrees, but knows it’s not true. Cooper is a continent away, and he won’t always be able to drop everything to fly to Ohio. He shouldn’t have to. Blaine will have to learn to cope by himself. He stands at the end of their path and watches Cooper’s car until he can’t see it anymore, and then turns and heads back inside.

On the glass table in the sitting room, Cooper has left the prospectuses of viable public schools. Blaine wants to gather them together and hide them, or throw them in the trash, but he knows they have to make a decision. He has to move schools, and realistically, they only have the options in Lima to choose between. 

They settle on enrolling him at William McKinley High School, if only because they seem to be open to last minute enrollment and West Lima isn’t even a real option. His mom tries to engage him, says they have an award winning Glee club and he enjoyed singing with the Warblers, so he could do that, right? He tries not to be surprised that she remembers, but he is. The last month has been a struggle, both of them fighting the holes where boxed wine takes over from real life. She’s reading from their literature anyway, looks at him over the top of a blood red prospectus. 

“Their drama productions are excellent,” she says, and lowers it enough for him to see her smile, wide and encouraging and so like his own. His answering smile is tight, and he doesn’t say it out loud because she worries too much as it is, but McKinley can write whatever it wants to. As far as he’s concerned, it’s still the school Santana left because she was a lesbian and she wasn’t safe.

He takes it out on his punching bag, and he doesn’t talk to anyone at all.

He starts two weeks late and, when he arrives, McKinley is - it’s high school. Blaine shows up as the senior year transfer, the new kid, and already the subject of much gossip. Even the receptionist gives him a strange look when he signs in. “From Dalton?” she says, surprised and sceptical, and he nods his head and doesn’t meet her eyes. He’s wearing his leather wrapped tight to his body, as much like armour against the stares as he can. He watches as she makes a note on her computer, and tells him to report to the principal. 

“Can’t I just get my schedule?” he says, and the receptionist stares at him from behind her glasses. 

“No,” she says. “Principal Sylvester likes to welcome everyone personally.”

Blaine takes his paperwork from the counter and sighs. Day one, and this school is already bananas.

The only thing that does make sense in the swirl of cheerleading skirts and the funky smell of public school corridors is Brittany. She meets him outside of the principal’s office and offers to take him through basic orientation. One familiar face is better than no familiar faces, he decides, and he lets Brittany guide him through the corridors and cafeteria, her ponytail swinging behind her head and her sneakers squeaking on the polished floor. He’s not really taking in what she’s saying as he tries to work out where he fits in here, if there is a space he could inhabit. Probably not, he decides. There’s not enough time for that.

She ends her tour at the choir room, and she says, “When I told Santana you were coming here, she got kinda angry at first and then she said you like to sing, that you were a Gargler. That’s what we do here. It’s a safe place.” 

“Warbler,” Blaine says absently, and glances inside, at the risers and the piano and the cabinets, and wonders what their budget is. 

“What?”

“Nothing.” When he looks at her, he sees that she is clearly waiting for some kind of response and so he says, “You guys won last year, right?” She nods and shrugs a shoulder, and he blinks at her. Maybe it wouldn’t be so awful. 

Maybe

-

Things change. They fall apart and they put themselves back together, and Blaine’s life finds a new pattern. His dad gives him $500 - an apology for leaving him with more than his young shoulders should have to carry, perhaps, or because he feels guilty for not being able to fund Blaine’s senior year and run two houses, it doesn’t really matter - and tells him to buy himself a car. Blaine buys himself an old Volvo with far too many miles on the clock, but it runs and it’s reliable and it means he can drive himself to school without having to face the bus or wait for his mom to come downstairs. He can leave her tea on the nightstand beside her alarm clock and slip out of the door, and pretend for a few extra hours that he’s just like every other child of a single parent milling around the corridors and entrances. 

Outside of Glee club, Blaine doesn’t see much of Brittany. She has the Cheerios anyway, and Blaine’s not a sports person, and halfway through the year she disappears altogether. There are whispers that she’s gone to MIT, that she’s some kind of math genius, and Blaine thinks she’s certainly something, but math genius wouldn’t have been his guess. 

Instead, there’s a quiet Asian girl who takes to sitting next to him during Glee, and who he sees in most of his classes. He recognises her, vaguely, but doesn’t know why, but he finds that he likes her and wants to spend time with her. Her name is Tina, and, from the blue in her hair to the way her clothes are designed to keep absolutely everyone at arm’s length, Blaine can feel that she probably understands. 

In the quiet of the library as they study, both of them taking Advanced Placement wherever they can, desperate to get out of Ohio at any cost, she asks him questions and he finds himself answering with a frankness that surprises him. He tells her about his dad leaving over the summer, and about his mom, and how things have been since he was hospitalised because he’s gay. That last one leaves him shaking slightly, waiting for her to react, to sneer or leave, but she only reaches out and lays her hand on his wrist, her palm cool and her touch grounding.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and she actually sounds like she means it.

In return, she tells him about her life. She was born in Korea, and adopted by an American couple. She doesn’t remember Korea at all, was only a baby when they brought her to Ohio. Some days she feels like she doesn’t have an identity at all, as if every different part of her is an affectation, and it scares her that she’s almost 18 and she has no idea who she is. Her boyfriend graduated the year before, and they broke up over the summer, and - 

“I haven’t seen you at the synagogue in a little while,” she says, staring at him until he shifts uncomfortably and looks away. “So I wondered if everything was okay.” She pauses, and a blush tints her cheeks pink as she looks down. “I guess not, hey?”

Blaine snorts a laugh that earns him a glare from the librarian, and he gathers his books into a neat pile. “Not really,” he says, and then, because the air is heavy with all the things he doesn’t have words for, “Come on. We’ll get coffee.”

The relief on her face is palpable, and Blaine feels his heart go out to her, even as he wonders if everyone at McKinley is as lonely as he is.

-

By the time Christmas comes around again, Tina is meeting him in the parking lot at 7.30. She has double-cupped hot coffee balanced on the roof of her car for both of them, and a warm hug just for him. Blaine likes to be out of the house before his mom is up, before she comes downstairs and burns her fingers on the toaster, and before she opens up the laptop and tries to find work she’s capable of doing. Blaine suspects she’ll go back to selling cosmetics, as she did when Cooper was young, but he still likes to start his day before she’s up. So he leaves tea beside her bed at 7.10, and is slipping out of the door at 7.15, just as her alarm starts to beep.

“How are things today?” Tina asks, cutting into his reverie. He drops his chin and snorts a mirthless laugh, and Tina presses her mouth into a line. 

“You know,” he says, shrugging a shoulder at her and claiming his coffee, inhaling deeply. His smile feels lopsided, but Tina doesn’t comment, only leans against him and hugs him once more, the top of her beanie tickling his jaw. He hugs her back with one arm, coffee still held precariously in the other as his bag slides from his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” she says, familiar now and yet still sincere, and he nods.

“I know. It is what it is. It’s better.” He stands still as she rearranges his bag and pulls the collar of his jacket up against the cold before pulling the lace of her gloves looser around her fingers, the clasps of her rings tangling in the fabric. He puts his cup down and picks the fabric free with deft fingers.

“You should play piano with those hands,” Tina says, and Blaine laughs, actually laughs, just as the bell rings. She grins at him, her eyes sparking, and he takes her hand in his.

“We should head inside,” he laughs, and he wraps an arm around her as they turn and head together towards the doors. Together, he thinks, they could tear down the world.

-

Blaine tries to settle into the routine of public school, but realises quickly that there are things about it that he hasn’t quite come to terms with. The smells, the noise - 

It’s the banging of trays that bothers him most, the way the noise shudders down his spine in ways that leave him on edge, nervous and restless. The sound of trays, and then a voice, quiet but intrusive and dressed in a McKinley Varsity jacket that clogs Blaine’s brain, saying, “So like, aren’t you that kid from the news? My mom wouldn’t enrol me at West Lima when we moved here, despite the fact it’d be easier -” 

Blaine’s tray slides from his hands, and he wakes up twenty minutes later in the nurse’s office, a cool hand on his forehead. The quiet voice from the cafeteria belongs to a blond boy with a wide smile and an expression that seems genuinely contrite. He wipes his hands on his hips and then pushes them into his pockets.

“Hey,” he says, and then, “I’m sorry? I didn’t mean for -” Tina pinches his arm and gives him a look, and he closes his mouth so abruptly that Blaine thinks he hears his teeth clack. He fidgets and tries to push himself upright, only to be pushed back down by the nurse, who shakes her head. Blaine tries to say he’s okay, but his words come out fuzzy and the nurse looks concerned. 

She lets him go once he has his speech under control, and Tina and the boy - who introduces himself as Sam Evans, and seems nice, behind the blinding red of his letterman jacket - walk with him to his car.

“Are you going to be okay?” Tina asks, and Blaine offers her a shaky smile and a nod.

“Yeah,” he says. He’s always all right. He’ll be fine. He pulls her into a brief hug, and she looks concerned when she lets him go.

“Study date at your house?” she says, and Blaine laughs and inclines his head. 

“Yeah,” he says. “I’ll provide a cheese plate.”

“Is that kosher?” she grins, and Blaine actually laughs and forgets to be scared. He watches her and Sam walk back across the lot, the two of them so different but easy with one another, and he wonders what it would have been like if he’d had longer, if someone hadn’t once tried to see if his body bounced on asphalt - 

Still, Tina is good, she understands, and they spend the rest of the semester eating lunch toe-to-toe in the back of Blaine’s car, the music turned down low and a box of tots between them. There aren’t any red coats in the car. There aren’t any trays, no loud noises, no hands too heavy on his shoulders as they lean in to grab at ketchup or salt. It’s just the two of them, and he’s okay with that.


	8. you've supported me for a long time

viii. _‘you’ve supported me for a long time’_

Both of his parents come to his graduation, both of them alone. Blaine knows his dad is trying to spare his mom’s feelings, and they sit stiffly beside one another until his mom starts crying and his dad offers her a tissue and a hug. Santana comes as well. He sees her take a seat behind his parents and knows that she’s only here for him, with Brittany being in Cambridge now. She comes wearing a cheerleading uniform that reminds him of a conversation they’d had before they left. 

‘Graduate top ten of your class and I’ll wear my uniform to your graduation,’ she’d said, and Blaine had asked what would happen if he didn’t. She’d looked at him, that stare that made him feel twitchy, as if she was reading his brain. 

‘I’ll come naked,” she’d replied blithely, and returned to filing her nails. He’d stared back at her for a long second, his face impassive, and then.

‘Coming any other way is just messy.’ 

She’d snorted so loud that Brittany’s cat - living with Blaine now, and on a strict diet - had jumped down from where he was perched, shielding himself from the summer sun with a book on astrophysics that Britt had insisted was his favourite before she left, and scuttled from the room. The memory makes him laugh, his grin spreading warm across his face the way it did before she left. He’s done better than top ten; he’s leaving McKinley in the top three of his class, and he’s proud of everything he’s accomplished. Santana sees him notice her, and she puts her thumbs up. He watches his dad follow his eyeline, and turn in his seat to introduce himself. Santana shakes Gabe’s hand, and that’s - that’s nice, Blaine thinks. 

-

His dad takes him out for dinner, just the two of them. It goes better than the aborted attempt in the summer, both of them more relaxed than they have been for years. Blaine syncs his iPod with the car, and his dad drums his fingers on the wheel to the tune, and Blaine says, “I miss you.” He’s surprised by the words, but once they’re out, he knows that they’re true.

“I miss you, too,” Gabe says, and turns his head to smile at him. Blaine smiles back.

“I’m going to New York,” he says. “Santana says there’s room in this loft she’s renting with friends in Brooklyn -” 

He stops talking for a second and watches the trees beyond the window of the car. When he looks back at his dad, he says, “I know it wasn’t because of me.”

“What wasn’t?”

“You and Mom. It’s been hard. Cooper came. But I know it wasn’t -”

Gabe’s face is sad and he shakes his head. “You,” he says, and halts. “You are one of the best things I’ve done, kiddo. And someday, when you find a guy who understands you and if you choose to have a family with him, you’ll understand that completely. I couldn’t want for better than I got.”

Blaine feels his eyes go blurry, and he ducks his head to play with his phone. Inside his chest, though, he feels his heart grow a size.

-

He leaves for New York in July. Santana comes back to help him pack his car with boxes, and both she and Tina - who is headed, eventually, for Rhode Island and Brown - head across country with him, taking it in turns to drive. True to her word, she’s living in an open plan loft with curtain dividers and a girl and a boy she used to go to McKinley with. 

“They're an acquired taste,” Santana says as she helps Blaine haul his cases up the stairs, feet and voices echoing. “Rachel’s dads are gay, so she's basically an expert, in her own opinion, on all related issues. Kurt is _actually_ gay, though, so at least that's one extra pair of eyes rolling when she gets going? But I mean, if you can learn to look past their fundamental character flaws, they're good people. Our people.”

Blaine doesn't answer. He doesn't know what to say. He's a long way from the familiarity of home, and he doesn't know what to expect. The high ceilings and open plan of the loft when Santana rolls the door back isn't it. It catches him unaware, and he looks at Santana for reassurance, steps inside when she beckons. Tina follows behind him, stands in the space with her mouth open, staring at the ceiling, and Blaine looks around cautiously, wondering how much privacy a curtain delineated room provides.

“Come in,” Santana calls, and then moves to drag him in further by the hand, presenting him to the congregated inhabitants and potential friends. The girl is petite, her brunette hair falling in careful waves down her back and her formal shorts barely skimming her mid-thighs. The boy is taller, everything about him drawing Blaine’s stare toward his face. He is, Blaine thinks and tries to crush, beautiful. It's hard not to see it, and harder not to stare. Blaine feels a blush burn in his cheeks when the boy crosses his arms over his chest and stares back at him. Santana doesn’t seem to see either of them, though, as her hand lands in the centre of his spine.

“This is Blaine,” she declares, shoving him forward. She points at the girl, “No jokes about his size, hobbit. I know you wear lifts in your penny loafers.”

The girl ignores her and steps forward, holding out her hand. “Hello, Blaine,” she says. “My name is Rachel Berry, and one day you’ll be seeing it on billboards. Let me give you a tour.” 

Blaine doesn't have a chance to respond before Rachel is gripping his hand in her own, dragging him toward the kitchen, gesturing around her with wide sweeps of her arm toward the bedrooms and the book shelves and the carefully disparate array of chairs that comprise their living room. She speaks fast, asks him questions that she gives him no opportunity to answer, and he follows her helplessly. When he glances back at Santana, she has marshalled Kurt and Tina into helping her move his cases further into the loft so that she can close the door. 

It's Kurt who catches his pleading stare, who says, “Rachel, it's a long drive from Ohio. Let him breathe.” And then, crossing the empty space between them, he extends his hand like an olive branch. “I'm Kurt. Let me get you a coffee? There’s a bakery we love a couple of blocks over, we could split a cannoli.” He pauses, and Blaine blinks, offers a tentative smile which Kurt returns and then adds, “Or other pastry of your choosing, if you don’t like cannoli?” 

Behind him, Santana puts up both thumbs and nods her head, and Blaine takes a shaky breath. He isn’t sure if this is home, not yet, but it feels like a beginning, and he’s waited long enough for one of those.


End file.
